Category: Google

With a new option, it’s now possible to get all your old columns settings back.

If you’ve been putting off the hassle of rebuilding your beautiful columns layouts from the old AdWords interface, Google has acknowledged your pain. This week, Google added the ability to copy your columns preferences from the old AdWords interface to the new Google Ads interface.

How to do it. Go to the Tools icon in the upper right corner of the UI and select Preferences (under the Setup column). Expand the new “Columns preference” option to copy your previous column preferences to your Google Ads account.

Important to note. There are a couple of things to keep in mind before selecting this option. First, the change is permanent. If you click the “Copy Columns” (shown in the screenshot above), you’ll see the following notice before confirming the change:

“Copying columns replaces all of your existing Google Ads columns – in all accounts – with your previous AdWords columns. This change can’t be undone and takes up to 24 hours. You can see your column status in your column preferences.”

Second, if you’re logged into an MCC (master account), the columns preferences will copy over to all of the accounts under that MCC. If that’s not what you’re looking for, log in to the individual accounts to apply your old copy settings. – Read more

Google is expanding its use of lucrative search-based advertising tools on YouTube, to help advertisers target potential customers as they search for everything from products to movie trailers on the video site. The news, announced this morning at Advertising Week and reported by CNBC, marks a shift in how Google treats YouTube. Increasingly, the company is relying on YouTube as an extension of its core search engine instead of a separate entity. To help drive home the point, Google representatives told the crowd at Advertising Week that YouTube is the second most popular search engine in America, behind Google Search.

The logic makes sense, and Google says it has data to prove that many people who search for products, movies, and other items on Google Search then head over to YouTube to watch reviews, unboxing videos, and other content related to the product. From there, Google says it can effectively target those customers. For instance, searching for movie reviews on Google Search and then heading over to YouTube to watch a trailer may trigger an ad for showtimes at your local AMC theater. Google is calling the tool “ad extensions for video.”

For Google, expanding its ad business is a key component to staving off competition from Facebook and, increasingly, Amazon, which has been building a powerful, product-based ad business based off Amazon product searches. Today, Google makes nearly $100 billion a year. A majority of that revenue comes from ads, a majority of that ad revenue is search-based advertising powered by Google’s AdWords, AdSense, and DoubleClick technologies. However, Google’s dominance in web advertising is tied to the strength of the web, and more companies, like Amazon and Facebook, are cutting into that by locking customers and the behaviors that would drive targeted ads into their own ecosystems. Every time an internet user spends time on Facebook or searches for products directly on Amazon instead of Google is a potential loss for the search giant’s ad business. – Read more

For many years Google AdWords allowed 25 characters for a single headline and 35 characters per line for two lines of description text. Then Google gave us two headlines of 30 characters each and a description line of 80 characters. It was like Christmas with all that new real estate.

Well, the increased ad copy must have been a success because Google Ads (formerly AdWords) has made a couple of changes that advertisers should know about. You can now add more text to your existing text ads and utilize a new type of text ad.

More Text for Existing Ads

To see the new options, navigate to your Google Ads account and view some ads — account, campaign, or ad group level. Click the blue plus sign to create a new ad. It will produce the following drop-down menu. – Read more

Gone are the days where shoppers had one specific gift in mind. Today, they’re asking brands to help inspire them. Our research also shows that 61 percent of shoppers are open to buying from new retailers during the holiday season—and in the 2017 holiday season 46 percent of them actually did.

That’s a huge number of consumers looking to uncover new brands and products or re-discover old favorites. But with so much choice at their fingertips, shoppers need help cutting through the clutter and feeling confident in their choices.

A recent study shows that Google is the first place US shoppers go to discover or find a new brand or product. That’s why we’re continuing to invest in solutions to drive inspiration and discovery, capture intent, and amplify your message to customers, wherever they’re shopping across Google and the web. So lean back, grab an eggnog (it’s never too early), and learn about how consumers plan to shop this holiday—and how Google can help. – Read more

Google is testing showing like and dislike thumbs up and down buttons in the hotel search results specifically on photos. You can like or dislike a photo within a specific hotel search result.

This was spotted by Sergey Alakov and posted on Twitter – here is his screen shot:

I do believe this is new and I am not sure exactly what Google would do with these likes and dislikes on photos. Maybe a hotel result with many photos can be ranked by the most liked photos first? – Read more

Ahrefs, Moz, SEMrush…there are some great SEO tools out there; and with them, you can do a variety of things. You can check backlink profiles. Do keyword research. Find unlinked mentions and guest posting opportunities. You can even run comprehensive SEO audits with the click of a button. But whether you’re agency or in-house, small business or enterprise—there are certain areas of functionality where those tools fall short. And where they fail, Google Search Console prevails.

While powerful, the garden-variety SEO tool is, or should be, supplemental to your SEO strategy. If you’re in the business of optimizing for organic search, you should be living in Search Console and using other tools to help you complete ancillary tasks. Not totally comfortable with Search Console as a living space? Not to worry. Today, I’m going to teach you how to get nice and cozy with the most pivotal features Search Console has to offer.

Even better: after launching the new and improved Search Console in January, Google officially moved it out of beta last week. So today, while I’m going to be teaching you 7 steps to making the most out of the new Google Search Console, I’ll also discuss how the new interface and the old interact differ.

Alrighty, then! Let’s hop in.

Step #1. Add and Verify Your Site
Before we get into functionality, you’re going to want to add and verify your site within Search Console. Head to the dropdown at the top left of your dashboard and click “add property.”

Make sure you enter your site’s URL exactly as it appears in your browser. If you support multiple protocols (http:// and https://), or multiple domains (example.com, m.example.com, and www.example.com), make sure you add each as a separate property. Once your site is added, Search Console will begin collecting data.

Just adding a property won’t give you access, though—you also have to verify that you own it. Head to the Manage Property tab for the property you added on the Search Console home page.

Select “verify property” in the dropdown and choose one of the recommended verification methods. These will vary depending on the makeup of the site you’re verifying. If you’re struggling to implement one of the verification methods, want to change your verification method, or simply want a more in-depth explanation of each process, this page is a great resource on all things site verification.

Step #2: Indicate a Preferred Domain

Indicating a preferred domain tells Google whether you want your site listed as https://www.example.com or https://example.com. Choosing one over the other is not going to give you any kind of advantage in organic search; however, you do want to make sure you choose one or the other.

Select your property from the Search Console home page (note: we are doing this in the old Search Console). Once in, click the gear icon in the top right of your dashboard and select Site Settings: – Read more

I get it. We say we like learning about tools, but very few of us mean it.

Either you’re just getting started in SEO and overwhelmed by the tsunami of web-based programs, Chrome extensions and local apps flooding your brain, or you’re a seasoned vet comfortably content with the tools that have earned their place in your routine.

But…

It’s free. And it may not be here forever. And your competitors probably aren’t using it. And you’ve already read this much. And FOMO.

Still with me? Let’s dive in. Here’s a comprehensive guide to Google Correlate.

What Is Google Correlate?
Google Correlate uncovers keywords with similar time-based or regional search patterns to the data series or search query you provide.

It’s been described as the Google Trends antonym, where instead of keywords producing patterns, patterns point to keywords.

The History of Google Correlate
Knowing when and where influenza is spreading is critical. It helps us identify virus subtypes, learn when vaccines aren’t working, and when we ought to be more risk-averse to go out in public.

However, the CDC’s reporting was on a two-week delay, which can seem like an eternity when it comes to viruses.

Then came Google Flu Trends in 2008.

Researchers at Google hypothesized that using real-time, flu-related Google search activity would allow them to nowcast flu prevalence.

At first, it was incredibly accurate and received a lot of acclaim as a result.

It didn’t take long for folks at Google to realize this concept – correlating search trends with real-world data to build predictive models – could have unlimited uses beyond just the flu.

There’s often a great debate over ad rotation. Should you use Google’s highly recommended Optimize or the ad tester’s preferred method Do Not Optimize?

We took a look at just a few ad groups for one of our advertisers to show them why ‘optimize’ is not working for them; and we’d like to share a few examples and pitfalls to watch out for when choosing your ad rotation setting.

#1 Google Makes Mistakes

The first thing to note in our charts, we show the ‘enabled date’ of the ad so you can see when an ad was first enabled. However, the stats are only based upon the timeframe comparison. So, in our first example while the one ad was enabled 5 days before the second ad; the data shown is the last 90 as both ads were active in that timeframe. We do not compare data for date ranges when some ads weren’t actively competing against each other.

In our first example, the ad with the best CTR (which is not statistically significant), conv. rate, conversion per impression; and every single other metric was only served 29,866 times versus the ad that has the worse metrics was served 20 times more often with 617,723 impressions.

This is an obvious example of Google just making a bad choice. – Read more

That is, chasing minor ranking factors can lead to a dangerous waste resources, while at the same time neglecting holistic SEO that actually leads to higher rankings and better traffic.

Google uses 1000s of signals to rank web pages. Nobody knows what they all are (and anyone who claims otherwise is fibbing). In fact, since the rise of machine learning, not even Googlers can tell you all the elements that influence rankings and how they interact with one another in search results.

What matters is success.

SEO Success Factors are those elements you can take action on to improve your rankings, traffic, and visibility in Google search. Many Success Factors—but not all—are based on ranking factors, and a number of them deliver bigger results than others.

As an example, while meta descriptions aren’t a Google ranking factor, crafting well-composed descriptions that improve your click-through rate (CTR) can have a positive, outsized impact on your SEO efforts.

Using a combined analysis of dozens of sources, including:

Ranking factors studies

SEO Experimentation data

Expert opinion surveys

Patent filings

And statements from Google

… we’ve aggregated the most popular SEO Success Factors in one place. Our goal is to show you not only what works, but how to use these factors to improve your rankings and traffic.

Use this information is to prioritize the most critical factors first while working your way towards less important elements. – read more

With a Mobile-First philosophy, Google continues to update its search engine algorithms to meet the demands of technologically-savvy searchers.

In fact, Google has rolled out a Mobile-First version of its search engine index–this is the massive catalog of data on every web page in existence.

With the index, Google will display relevant results to searchers. Previously, Google looked at web pages through a desktop searcher. Soon, Google will place the first priority on the mobile versions of each web pages and second in priority are the desktop versions.

In this scenario, mobile first means any page that can be correctly viewed on a mobile device. Since the mobile version is treated as the primary site for your business, it means businesses need to beef up content for this version. Here’s a complete guide to what this means. – Read